Note – From a formal perspective it is defendable to say that the six not fully independent countries are no true countries, but in my view other perspectives are in an overview of FOIAs more relevant.
From the perspective of requesters it is important to notice that those six have FOIAs and FOI decisions and rulings that are significantly and even crucially deviant from those in the ‘mother’countries.

Note – There are a lot more FOIAs than the 86 mentioned in this list. For instance the Canadian provinces, the US States and [most of] the German Bundesländer have FOIA’s and more or less jurisdiction of their own.

Note – In this overview I use the number 86

The A2 list The 86 FOIA countries in chronological order

Country Year of formal approval or formal adoption of the FOIA
Year in which the FOIA came in power
Year of latest FOIA revision
Name of the FOIA

Armenia 2003 2003 Law on Freedom of Information
Croatia 2003 2003 Act on the Right of Access to Information
Kosovo 2003 2003 Law on Access to Official Documents Not complete in power
Mexico 2002 2003 Fed. Transparency and Access to Public Gov. Information Law
Peru 2002 2003 Law on Transparency
Slovenia 2003 2003 2005 Act on Access to Information of Public Character
St Vincent & Gren 2003 FOIA

Antigua/Barbuda 2004 2004 FOIA
Dominican Rep 2004 2004 Law on Access to Information
Ecuador 2004 2004 Transparency and Access to Information Law
Far Or 2004 2004 FOIA Danmark
Jamaica 2002 2004 Access to Information Act
Serbia 2004 2004 2007 Law on Free Access to Information of Public Importance
Turkey 2003 2004 Law on Right to Information

The A4 list The use of the 86 FOIAs – Number of requests per year per country

The working definition of ‘Number of requests’ in this list is:
- written requests [=paper+digital-oral] filed at
- national/federal bodies and/or level of
- executive bodies and
- excluded in this presentation: requests for personal formalities, social security applies etc.

The number of requests presented here is not more than a disputable estimate. The FOIA world has not yet an in-ternational grammar which makes it very hard to define, count and compare.
Technical remarks at the bottom of this chapter and more in the clarification section at the end of this overview.

Country Number of requests Inhabitants Number of requests
per year per 100,00 inhabitants

Some downsize examples
Bulgaria The last govt figure = 22.482 [2007] but 9.169 of them are oral = 13.000
Romania The govt figure is 700,000 but it has to be downsized -73% -10% -33% = 16.800
USA DoJ estimates that 900,000 of the 2,400,000 national/federal requests are
requests of a purely private nature = 1,500,000 requests for public information

Other remarks
UK-Scotland The UK FOIA covers also a part of Scotland, for instance cross-border public authorities, and/or
topics like foreign policy, defence, continental shelf

NR No registration
NRR No reliable registration

Warning The quality of the in list A4 presented figures is poor ! [see clarification section]

The A5 list The use of the 86 FOIAs – The country requests volume ranking

This ranking list is very provisional because:
- there are only figures of a few countries
- the quality of the figures is poor
Technical remarks in the clarification section

Note – On this list those bodies which have more or less an own legal system and/or jurisdiction

Note – It is remarkable that some of the above mentioned bodies, like the Council of Europe or the UN or the Worldbank, have opinions on FOI and FOIA without having a good set of transparency rules themselves

Clarification

Producing overviews like this one, and especially the sections A4 and A6, is as complicated and as tricky as it is because the international freedom of information community has not yet an own grammar. Essential definitions do not exist or are not yet agreed upon. I see this overview as a tool to stimulate debate. It can help understand each other’s positions. Comparing positions is a first step for custom build approaches.

Some ingredients of importance for comparing FOIAs and countries, for debate and for custom build approaches:

1 – What is a country?
Is it a geographical entity and/or a juridical entity? [Or a political or a cultural or a X entity?]. What is the difference between a country and a nation?
Scotland and Aruba are countries, have own FOIA’s, own FOIA jurisprudence and a jurisdiction. But what about Quebec, or Hongkong. What about US States, German Bundesländer, Swiss Cantons, and so on.
The chooses made in this overview are arguable. I try to facilitate the requesters perspective and not a formal definition.

2 – What is a FOIA?
There are amongst, groups of, users and lobbyist, like FOIANet, Article 19, Statewatch, Carter Center, Privacy International, Access Info, OS[J]I, Wobbing Europe and others, criteria in debate. Useful criteria for lobbying for instance at the Council of Europe, the OAS or the European Union. But there is no minimum standard for a FOIA.
In my view Italy and Nepal for instance have no true FOIA because of their interest requirements. And what about the FOIA’s of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Zimbabwe.
And what about bottle necks like the way in which the administrative appeal is organised, for instance the role, the independence and the power of the appeal commission, or the information commissioner and/or the ombudsman.

3 – What is a FOIA request?
There are a lot of reasons to not count in oral requests. For instance because in a lot of countries there is no good administration of oral requests. An even more important reason is that it is almost impossible to distinguish between a question addressed at a government body and an oral request.
In several countries civil servants are instructed to file a question about for instance a telephone number as an [oral] FOIA request.
A complication is that this way of registering creates a disadvantage for countries with a high illiteracy rate because in those countries a relative high percentage of all requests will be oral.
Asking for information, or for forms for personal use, for instance for social security are in several countries a part of the total number of FOIA requests. In order to compare countries those figures have to be disaggregated to reflect more accurate the requests for public information. Requests of a pure private nature have to be skipped. Of course the problem is that the quality of the figures not always allows this disaggregation.
A consequence of this way of registering is that for instance the number of national/federal US FOIA requests in this list is 1,500,000 and not the official 2,400,000. [This downsizing is based on an estimate of the US DoJ].
I only partly succeeded in disaggregating oral requests which means that the presented figures are not comparable. I finalized this part of the list just for one reason: The questions I formulate here.

4 – How to count FOIA requests?
The way of counting in countries is very different. Sometimes per ministry, sometimes per service, sometimes all figures of all levels, sometimes only the figures at national level, and so on.
Often there are no figures of requests filed at lower levels. Often the figures are not detailed enough to detect which part is filed at national/federal level and which part at lower levels; sometimes it is even not clear which levels are counted.
One additional problem is that a lot of national/federal bodies have also offices at lower levels. How do you count requests filed at those lower levels?
My suggestion is to compare the number of requests filed at national/federal bodies and/or level. This means that a lot of published figures have to be downsized. In this list I did not succeed in doing this for all figures. Again this means that the presented figures are not comparable. The working definition used in this overview is printed in section A4.

5- How to assess the success-rate?
After defining what success is there is only one figure easy to collect: the success after filing a request. In other words the success formulated in the first decision. The success of the next steps, the administrative appeal, the court appeal and the high court appeal, can be measured in a lot of ways. I choose for two, a cumulative one and one per litigation round. Working definitions of those two and of success in section A6.

6 – Before comparing the number of FOIA requests:
The need to file, in other words what is the Pro-active Transparency Rate
Before comparing countries one has to assess the pro-active transparency level or rate in those countries. As far as I know there are no reliable studies into this very interesting topic. Countries with about the same pro-active transparency rates are comparable. People in those countries have a comparable need to file requests. People living in countries with less proactive transparency have, objectively spoken, a greater need to file requests.
Countries like UK, US, The Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries have within a reasonable bandwidth about the same proactive transparency rate, but the numbers of requests appear to be very different. Countries like France, Spain and Italy have a lower pro-active transparency rate. The number of requests in those countries should be higher, the need to file should be bigger. The number of requests in those countries is almost not measurable……..

7 – What are reliable figures?
The next serious problem is the quality of the figures. Most of the figures presented by government bodies, but also those presented by lobbyists, tend to be too high. People often enlarge their role or love big numbers. Government bodies tend to enlarge their level of transparency.
So I do not trust on forehand figures of government bodies, of information commissioners, of ombuds-men, of NGOs, and so on. More reliable in my eyes are figures of true independent organisations like for instance law departments of universities.
The quality of the figures for number of requests in this overview is because of these reasons poor.

8 - More criteria
Understanding FOIA and transparency in different countries needs much more than consensus on the above mentioned topics. Before all there has to be a consensus about what essential topics are and what their definitions, position and/or role are, or should be.
The following very provisional list is meant for brainstorm purposes:

FOIA – the exemptions and, more important, the methodology of the exemptions

Quality, independence and power of administrative and of [high]court appeals

Execution of decisions and rulings

A nice exercise
I am looking forward to debates about topics like mentioned above. Especially because it can contribute to understand each other’s positions better. FOI, like everything with political of civil society aspects, is not one-dimensional and is not everywhere approachable in the same way. A real effective approach needs to be custom build.
Just one illustration. The political correct opinion is that Europe is [re-]united. Even if that would true it is a too undetailed way of looking to society. For FOIA practice it is important to assess the interferen-ce between, at least, all the aspects mentioned in this section..
Looking to the ‘united’ Europe I see five quit different cultures, traditions. Different in political, legal and civil society sense. These differences are so large that they have decisive influence on how to promote and how to practice FOI. These differences are of much more importance than the East-West division which existed only for about 50 years, peanuts regarding culture and tradition timelines. The five I see are, roughly:
Scandinavian/Nordic Scandinavian and Baltic states
Atlantic mainly UK / Netherlands
Latin-Roman France / Spain / Portugal / Italy
Central Germany / Austria / Hungary / Czech Republic
Eastern Balkan countries
In this very simple scheme I miss a lot of countries. And the scheme is not static, so is Germany moving from Atlantic [before 1989] towards a more and more central European position. And….. within each ‘group’ there are sometimes great differences in request volumes.
All the differences mentioned in this section have consequences for the legal systems, for the role of parliamentary politics, for the position of the press or civil society, for NGOs and so on.

In other continents you find the same political and cultural differences. In Africa for instance a part has a focus for legal matters on the Francophone world [which is a pity in the case of FOIA because the French FOIA is bureaucratic and almost not used]. Other parts are for legal matters more focused on for instance UK or the Netherlands, but there are also strong Arabic traditions also outside the Mediterranean countries.

Roger Vleugels

I am a Dutch independent forensic intelligence analyst, freedom of information specialist and editor/ publisher of Fringe. Since 1986 I lecture on journalism schools and universities on intelligence, on FOIA/Wob and on investigative journalism. In my legal practice I filed more than 2000 FOIA/Wob re-quests for my clients, mostly press organisations, but also NGOs, researchers and private person.
In English I publish two specialists email journals: Fringe Intelligence, a bi-weekly on intelligence news next-to-mainstream, and Fringe Spitting, a bi-weekly with tips and tools for investigative journalism with lots of FOI news. The Journals have 1200+ subscribers of whom 45% are intelligence watchers and analysts, 35% press, 10% FOI specialists. Of all subscribers 45% are non-Dutch, living in 50 countries; 10% of the subscribers are employees of government bodies and 10% are employed in universities.